


Slipstream

by kanadka



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Dissociation, F/M, Interactive Fiction, Other, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:15:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanadka/pseuds/kanadka
Summary: After the Psi Corps and the Mars Resistance, Lyta travels to the edge of Vorlon space and waits. And waits, and waits.
Relationships: Lyta Alexander/Kosh
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Slipstream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [janetcarter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janetcarter/gifts).



> There are multiple meanings to Kosh's text. Some are more sinister, some are more uplifting and loving. You can read the text forwards, or backwards, or follow the path of colours from bold red back to bold red (there are also some textual clues to help match a line to the next line if the colour isn't working, but you don't have to follow those clues, or the colours at all), or pull back and let your vision group similar colour moods together to form sets of lines, or if you're colourblind follow the shading/variations in lightness; and if none of the above sounds good, you can simply let your eyes drift along and pick up a meaning based on the path of your vision. There is no such thing as 'getting the hidden message wrong': all such hidden messages and interpretations are valid simultaneously, because Vorlon grammar clearly allows for all possible interpretations, swimming simultaneously in all directions.
> 
> If the text feels somewhat distracting and a little bit annoying, like you're trying to see one meaning but effects/colour/something else is getting in your way and preventing you from reading the full thing at once, that is actually the idea I'm going for (Vorlons operating on a higher level understanding of the rest of the universe) and thus is intended to be part of the fun, but if it ever becomes not-fun, don't forget that you can always turn off the style by using the 'hide creator's style' button at the top.

Unsurprisingly, only IPX was willing to go that close to Vorlon space, and they weren't willing to go in. It turned out they weren't willing to hang around it forever, either—not that Lyta had the credits to keep them paid even if they were (it had been a very long time since the Corps days). They left her there nearly five days ago, and it was a long, lonely slog in the lifepod. Once every ten minutes, she sent out signals past the boundary of the Vorlon territory, but they went unacknowledged. That gave her lots of time to think.

Lyta did feel a little bit bad. Actually, she felt a _lot_ bad. The Commander seemed particularly crushed by what happened with Talia Winters, and even though she knew that it was the Corps' doing—they were the ones who planted that fake personality in Talia, and even if Talia had consented what did consent mean when you had years of brainwashing?—Lyta couldn't help feeling a little, well. _Responsible_.

Talia wasn't a Psi Cop. Talia was just some other P5 commercial teep, like Lyta'd been. Actually, she was probably very much like Lyta'd been, because Lyta had worked for Xenocorp and walked around in aliens' minds, and Talia was stationed on Babylon 5. Sure, most of her clients were probably human, but Lyta imagined they couldn't've all been. Humans made stronger telepaths than just about any other race, and even a P5 was better than a strong Centauri. You wanted the best credits could buy on that station, it would've been Talia.

Once, it was Lyta. But that whole ... mess with the Vorlon attempted assassination had started a weird path that Lyta didn't think most telepaths travelled. That's why it had to end the same way it began. This was the only place it halfway made sense; this was the only place she felt answers would actually be.

Whether they gave them to her ... that was another story. Vorlons didn't as a general rule seem too forthcoming. The ambassador she'd scanned wasn't, either. 

In her decade with Xenocorp (that was such a cushy job, she reflected, it'd be real nice to go back there... she had something like colleagues, something like respect), Lyta had spent time in Narn minds, Centauri minds, and pak'ma'ra minds. She'd thought the pak'ma'ra were the strangest by far—they were a very collective culture, and that warped their thought patterns in a neuroplasticity kind of way—until she'd had to scan the Vorlon. The pak'ma'ra were like any old mundane by comparison. The Vorlon ... made no sense. And yet, perfect sense.

The Vorlon will come for me, she told herself. More of a way to soothe her anxiety than anything. Lyta sent out another signal. No response.

Time passed. Time slowed. Time became the same. Uniform, ironed out, a belt of fabric. She lost track of the times she sent the signals, and suspected that she was becoming more and more irregular about it. (Would that piss off the Vorlons? They liked order. The one she scanned liked order, anyway. Everything in its precise place—everything on the right level—structure, deeper, forever, as far as she could feel. It was all so perfect.) She turned off the lifepod clock when it began to distract her around day three. The other instruments were meters and readings: O2, heating, other supplies. She couldn't turn those off; she covered these with a jacket to better ignore them.

Lyta sent out another signal. No response. Had it even been ten minutes since the last one? She couldn't tell... she sent out another one.

Her concentration fell—slipping, losing balance—and at the same time it seemed to hold. Strange. Had it been ten minutes yet? She sent out another signal...

_a moment of being_

Had it been ten minutes yet?

It was only as Lyta tried to send out another signal that she realised she had not stopped sending the previous one. Well, it doesn't take minutes to send a telepathic signal, Lyta thought.

She had not stopped sending the one before that. Or the one before that.

There were many signals. The interference of them amplified, a deafening chorus of thought.

Something inside Lyta realised it before she was fully aware: I don't have the bandwidth for something this big. But she had somehow become an open channel, inviting...

Maybe this was the right thing to do? That was a guess.

She cleared her mind, and sent the signal, pressing on. It morphed into the first signal—it _was_ the first signal. She had been sending one signal all along. She had sent infinite signals. She had sent no signals but was open to receive. She had received everything. Was still receiving everything. The universe was in her mind. The universe _was_ her mind.

Lyta couldn't disengage.

Oh, this could be bad, she thought. No, she also thought, don't fear. This is right. This is what I should be doing, ever since I touched that Vorlon, that time in Medlab. This completes the circle.

"You're here," she said.

Her voice sounded so strange, so distant, like an echoing whisper in vacuum.

There was a blinking red light under the jacket she had thrown over the supplies control panel. The lifepod is out of oxygen, she realised.

Don't fear...

Lyta exhaled fully and there came an uproarious symphony, processed all at once and over again, in a temporal loop, as the power of a cosmic dam burst forth:

\--- this is a projection of the infinite upon a lower dimension..... 

. . .I don't mean to be superioṛ

Ị don't mean to patronise— 

**you** do not know the meaning of love-

 _you will_ know the meaning of loyalty - for you will be **ours**

we must push you to your limits so that you feel it, _more profound_

so that you sense it, without your senses

so that it is plunged inside every physical crevice of you ⋅

 _you will_ glimpse ascendance but you remain unascended. . .

—it is not by design to keep you constrained, but by n𝕖c𝕖ss𝕚𝕥𝕪

⋱ I must expand you

⋅ for if you take it all at once you cannot hold it, you cannot bear it

.....you have to let it go to know any cosmic speck at all...

you have to be at the end of it to experience the beginning ---

𝕪o𝕦 h𝕒d to come here and die (a little death)

-but I will teach you, for my love is unending, undying &&

I w i sh I could tell you you are perfect as you are but to hear it would destroy you _so you must change_

\- -that you may breathe me in ⋰

&& that you may know- -

...in so knowing, conceive of it: this glimpse of perfection that I am, that you are, that you will be

a moment of perfect i o n

A warmth, an affection. It's everywhere, it's eternal... it's ecstasy...

Lyta reeled back in the pod, panting. She tingled in places she had forgotten about (she wasn't even that _old_ ), her vision swam with spots, her muscles were weak like she had clenched each one hard in a mindful successive sequence only to let them all go at once. She had definitely come. She looked down at her hands—ungloved—and felt nearly out of place inside her skin, like she had been walking among the stars, like being back in flesh form was an adjustment she wasn't too sure about.

She glanced again and saw a long dark cape, brilliant speckling lights, in tune with the symphony; she shifted her vision to the window to see her reflection and first it looked like an encounter suit with a sharp, bright blue aperture.

She blinked, and only then could she perceive herself: red hair, tied back. Sharp nose, sharp features. Pale skin. Nothing out of the ordinary except for her eyes, which had fogged over thick and which became a brilliant white-blue light, like stars. Like the Vorlon.

He's inside me, she knew. Inside my body, inside my brain. He can control this.

Lyta plucked the jacket up off the control panel with her mind. Fronds extended from her, from her eyes, from her temples, from her mouth, and grasped it—she saw them, and she didn't see them, at the same time. They existed, she understood, on another plane; that's all telekinesis really was, in the end. The jacket floated past her, suspended in space, its trajectory inertial but a constant reminder of the initial telekinetic push. _Her_ push; _her_ power.

 _You control this_ , they said together. _I control this_ , they replied. The fog swirled and wisped around her body once more, encased it in tendrils like a fern unrolling, like ivy penetrating, and her mind overdosed on rapture. The gasp she intook, he fed her the air, a shiny wormlike hose of glittering power, kissed to her lips.

All numbers of O2, heating, supplies, everything had vanished. In their place was a message on the control panel screen that read: _do you want more?_

There was (not yet) a thought about what she could do with that 'more'. There was no thought about a plot, a plan, a misdeed, a direction, a goal. There was no temptation of power, no corruption... she did not answer so that she could craft herself into a tool. Into a weapon.

There was only love and acceptance. There was only _being_. And it was the most natural thing in the universe to open her mind and lay herself out, entranced, for the sheer joy and glory of it.

"Yes," she breathed. The Empire opened its arms to her, and the pod under alien guidance sped towards the Vorlon homeworld.


End file.
